Spiritual Awakening - We are all connected

Last Spring my family had the blessing of serving as hosts for John Lomuria, a Kenyan Quaker who was in the United States as one of ten members of the editorial board for the Quakers Uniting in Publications Quaker youth book project. At one point, we were sitting around the table having tea, my husband, Graham, mentioned a friend who was having a baby. He said, “It will be their first child.” John said, “In America, when someone is pregnant, you assume there will be a baby. But in Kenya, we can’t do that, we just have to pray to God.” This worked on me. Of course, there’s the issue of access to health care, but what John said worked on me in a deeper way. I thought about agency and the barriers to faithfulness – if one understands oneself as the prime mover of one’s life, that’s a barrier to submission to God. I wondered about privilege and the constructs and walls we can build around ourselves and our hearts to make ourselves feel less vulnerable, safer – these can end up being barriers to touching, seeing, loving one another. If I am centered in an understanding that God is in charge and that prayer, faith, and love of one’s neighbor are key to one’s survival – that we cannot survive alone, then my own sphere of concern shifts from the center and is replaced by a focus on loving, on compassion, on obedience to God. I told John what was on my heart and he said, “Yes, what are we here to do but feed our brothers and sisters?”

I often remember this conversation on my daily walk to work. I used to keep my head down, keep to myself, bought into the rule ‘don’t talk to strangers’ (some days, to be fully honest, I still do – habits of thinking take a long time to fully subside), but I understand myself and others differently than I used to. We are, each of us, spiritual beings – we are not merely our history, or our assumptions, our race or status, our habits, or our wounds, we are not even our experiences – we are all these and also beyond these, we are spiritual beings able to slough off habits of thinking and societal teachings, so that we can more fully be in connection with one another, to more fully understand one another as children of God and as One. We are able, if we can look one another fully in the eye, and not flinch or look away from the joy or the pain, to understand that the kingdom of God is right in front of us, and that we can make it manifest by fully seeing, touching, loving one another right where we are, as we are, and by challenging one another into greater wisdom. I remember this on my walk to work and try to greet each person as a wonderful surprise, a gift on the journey, a potential friend or teacher. Can we awaken to the presence of God through the daily practice of love, by greeting cheerfully the unknown, and by being willing to feed and be nourished by our brothers and sisters?

Extending beyond the ‘prism of selfhood’ toward a life centered in God and compassion is the subject of Karen Armstrong’s latest book The Case for God. She details the great lengths throughout history to which humankind has extended in order to experience a sacred reality. She provides numerous detailed depictions of religious life because the perception of the sacred is based on particular rigorous practice: “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle.” She chronicles religious practices and uncovers the highest intention of religious life – to awaken, to become enlightened by “systematically cutting off egotism at the root.”

Two summers ago Christopher Sammond presented the Bible Half Hours at the FGC Gathering. Quaker Press of FGC has recently published his talks in pamphlet form – Living out the Kingdom while Living in the Empire: Bible Lessons from the 2007 Annual Gathering of Friends. Sammond explores passages from the Book of Esther to uncover what it means to live out the kingdom in the way Jesus intended in the story of the Good Samaritan: “The point is that the hated, the despised, the other is the neighbor we are bound to love as ourselves. All of us have someone, or some people, in our lives who are other. …Jesus tells us what we’re supposed to do with this other, this neighbor, the despised one. We’re not asked to care for, to honor, to treat ethically, to befriend, or to tolerate this neighbor. We are commanded, not asked, we are commanded to love them. That’s what it means to live out The Kingdom. It’s that simple. This is the way that Jesus preached about the kingdom. It’s already here.” This pamphlet is rich with profound examples of how to love and live in this way.

Enlivened by the Mystery: Quakers and God edited by Kathy Hyzy and published by Western Friend is a collection of fine essays, poetry, and fiction which describe western Quakers' experiences with the divine. The resulting anthology is a rich devotional text which offers many textures, tastes and glimmers of God. As one small example of the quality of the contributions, here is a quote from a submission by Rob Pierson, “As I walk under the beautiful skies of New Mexico, watching aspen leaves emerge in the spring, listening to them clink quietly in the summer breeze, and seeing them turn golden in autumn, falling to the forest floor, I know we can meet in that field beyond ideas. In fact, in Meeting we seek to sit in that field together and feel the breeze, the ruach, breath of God. The Beauty and the Light are already there; we just have to drop the beliefs that separate and blind us.” Contributors include Marge Abbott, David Albert, Eleanor Dart, Iris Graville, Robert Griswold, Jeanne Lohmann, Anthony Manousos, Maria Melendez, Peggy Senger Parsons, Lynn Waddington, and Ashley Wilcox.

A Lasting Gift: The Journal and Selected Writings of Sandra L. Cronk edited by Martha Paxson Grundy records the life and faith of Sandra (Sonnie) L. Cronk, Quaker author, teacher and spiritual guide. In his foreword Parker Palmer says of Cronk: “Sonnie was called to deep and meaningful service of other people’s souls – a vocation that attracted scant attention in the public world but had life-changing personal consequences for those she served as a teacher and spiritual guide. In her very person, Sonnie taught me much about the priority of being over doing. … None of us needs to find ‘more of me,’ because we are already found by God.” In familiar Quaker journal tradition, this book takes the reader into the daily practice of a life of faith with God clearly at the center.

In her Pendle Hill pamphlet Integrity, Ecology, Community: The Motion of Love Jennie Ratcliffe contends that, if we are to survive, what is required is a spiritual awareness of our oneness which reminds us that we live in intimate relationship and kinship with each other, the earth, and the Divine. She says, “Perhaps our only task is, simply, to respond to what Friends call the ‘promptings of love and truth in our hearts,’ to turn and keep turning in the direction of an integral life, and to love as best we can, knowing that we are not alone, but sustained, however mysteriously and uncertainly, by the wholeness and integrity of the earth, of God, and of all that is.”

When my son, Simon, was four he had major surgery for a congenital heart defect. Graham and I, needless to say, felt vulnerable (while at the same time feeling exceedingly grateful to have access to excellent health care). On the morning the surgery was scheduled, Simon woke up, put a few things in a little portfolio and said, “I’m all packed and set for a nice stay at the hospital.” I was amazed at how he could regard such a huge unknown, such a scary prospect, so matter of factly, so cheerfully in fact. I learned from him that day that our vulnerability and our joy live side-by-side, that the sweetness of life is only accessed if we are willing to courageously encounter what scares us most and walk through it, and that it is in our vulnerability and connection with one another that we learn to love, and to awaken to the presence of God.

I hope this message finds you encircled by love and mystery.